SOUTHERN LIGHTS: TV changed, but is it really any better?

Sunday

Nov 10, 2013 at 12:01 AM

In the early 1950s, a friend’s family bought the first television set I ever saw. I remember it as more machine than screen. It was about the size of a modern clothes washer; you viewed the televised action on a glass window smaller than a cigar box.

In the early 1950s, a friend’s family bought the first television set I ever saw.I remember it as more machine than screen. It was about the size of a modern clothes washer; you viewed the televised action on a glass window smaller than a cigar box.That is, you viewed the action when you could tune it in.Even then, the picture rolled a lot and diagonal striped lines showed up across the screen. As I recall, the set could pick up only one channel — black and white, of course, and mostly at night.That was all right because nobody much watched TV during the day. In fact, nobody much watched it at all, except on special occasions.One of those occasions was on Sunday night, when CBS’s “The Ed Sullivan Show” came on. Everybody with a TV set watched it.I know some wealthy friends had a TV set by the fall of 1956 because I remember them discussing Elvis Presley’s first appearance on the program with my mother.The program only showed Presley from the waist up, our friends said. He didn’t wear that gold lame suit, either. And Sullivan wasn’t even around for that particular show.Still, Elvis was sensational.It wasn’t so long after that — maybe just a few years — that our family finally got a TV set of our own.It was a big brown Zenith, a gift from my mother’s half-sister. She even bought the aerial for us.That’s how you knew who had a TV — whether or not they had an aerial ticking up somewhere on their roof.Even back then, some folks took TV watching to extremes. One family who went to our church had a gigantic aerial that sat apart from their house and towered over it. Supposedly, they could get TV from Pensacola if the conditions were right.That was cool, we thought, considering the fact that we lived in south-central Alabama.It was almost as cool as the names for their boys, Flip and Snap. I guess they really were nicknames but we didn’t know it at the time.All our TV could get was three channels — most of the time. There was WSFA in Montgomery, WBRC in Birmingham and Channel 13 in Birmingham.They say the call letters for Channel 13 were WAFM but I don’t remember that. It didn’t come in all that well.You could get public television — we called it educational TV — too, but we didn’t watch it all that much in my family. Six hours of school was usually enough for one day.Still, there was plenty to learn. I even ordered a special Jon Gnagy art kit that I saw on TV one time.After all, my older sister had been allowed to order a Ding Dong schoolhouse that she’d seen on a friend’s TV set a couple of years before.We had less than a handful of channels, but we had it good, compared to some other places. When I visited my grandmother in southwest Alabama, they could only get one TV station, WTOK out of Meridian. We didn’t watch much TV at her house.Besides, there were other things to do, like baseball, fishing, hunting, playing outside.For our generation, TV always lurked around the corner, however. In the end, it became kind of a ravenous lodger, eating more and more of our time.Of the stations we could get at our house, Channel 13 was CBS and partly ABC. You could do that then.WBRC was NBC, and WFSA was a mix of NBC and local programming, so we had all the bases kind of covered.We were all excited when Selma, my hometown, got its own TV station. It never had a network affiliation that I knew of, and it relied pretty much on local programming, but it was still big stuff, having your very own TV station.True, some of its programming wasn’t very imaginative. In the afternoon they would set up a camera to pan the road in front of the station. For several hours, it just broadcast the road and cars passing by.We watched it, though. Friends would drive by and you could tell them the next day in school that you saw them on TV.“Oh yeah?” they’d say nonchalantly, perhaps through a wad of bubble gum.The next afternoon, you’d drive by the station. It may have been dumb, but it turned out to be an amazingly popular feature.At night, the local station would have some kind of variety show. One time, a friend’s father came on with a little band, and they played “Sheik of Araby.” When they weren’t blowing their horns, they swayed and smiled and clapped their hands.My friend and I watched it on the tube at home. Suddenly, my buddy bunched over laughing and started punching me.“What a crock of s---!” he chortled.To tell you the truth, the local station was a great, stinking crock.After a while, it got consolidated or closed down or something.Same thing happened when Tuscaloosa had a TV station. Bye-bye, T-Town. Hello, Birmingham.Montgomery was a different story. I loved the local programming on WSFA. It included a kids’ auction program where you got to sit in the bleachers and bid bags of potato chips for stuff.Channel 13 had the same kind of show, featuring someone who wore a cowboy hat — cowboys were hot with kids in the ’50s — and called himself Benny Carle. He showed a lot of Western movies in between interviewing kids in the bleachers.I was on both shows, but I never got interviewed.Also, I was a member of the WBRC Circle Six Ranch. As part of the membership, you got a wallet card with the secret Circle Six code on it. I still have mine, somewhere.WSFA in Montgomery was big on Tiger football. It had “The Auburn Football Review” featuring Carl Stephens and Selma native Ralph “Shug” Jordan. They even pronounced Jordan like you would in Selma — “Jerdan.”“You’re so right, Carl,” Jordan would say.Stephens also doubled as “Cartoon Carl” for WSFA.Alabama? One of the Birmingham stations had the “Bear” Bryant show. But it was hard to find live college football games anywhere on TV.They had some wrestling, boxing and a lot of baseball. But that was about it.Still, we watched a lot of TV. There was Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and “77 Sunset Strip” (the title had mildly salacious overtones). “Out of the Western skies” flew this cowboy in an airplane: Sky King. There was J. Fred Muggs, Mr. Green Jeans, Winky Dink, Miss Frances ... Plus a lot of gimmicks. There was a plastic thing that was supposed to “colorize” your black-and-white TV if you put it over the screen.Also for sale was a sheet of plastic that you could put over the screen and trace the profile of the villain on a certain program. Then they’d show it the next week and you’d know who it was if you put up the plastic sheet with the traced profile.That’s to say nothing of the Jon Gnagy “Learn to Draw” kits and Ding Dong schoolhouses.The commercials got all up in our heads. I can still sing the “Frosty Morn” song. The same is true of “See the USA, in your Chevrolet ...” and about a million others.All of this was in black and white. Oh, I suppose they had color then, but it was for the rich folks.My memories of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 are in black and white, because that’s how they appeared on our TV set. We were glued to it for hours.Too much TV? After that, we couldn’t get enough. Cape Kennedy. LBJ. Black Panthers. George Wallace. Golden Flake. Vietnam. Phil Snow.TV was playing in the lobby of the dorm all the time I was in college. I watched the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention on it.By then, the picture had mostly stabilized and those vertical lines were gone. Yet I think they still had test patterns, which you’d get from the time a station signed off (around midnight or 1 a.m.) until it signed back on again (around 5 a.m. or sunup).You never see a test pattern — all those concentric circles and rays and doodads — these days. Most stations are 24-hour, round-the-clock operations.TV Guide has changed, too. There are about 900 channels now, as opposed to three or four in the old days. That’s a pretty good reason for a makeover.A few years back, we bought this big flat-screen TV and signed up with a cable company to get dozens and dozens of those channels.It’s a cliché to say there isn’t much to watch on them, besides news, old movies and sports. But it’s true. You can flip through them like a deck of cards.OK, OK, we watch “Masterpiece Theater” and other shows on PBS, “Masters of Sex,” “Homeland” and a few other programs. And yes, I’d hate to think of what life would be like without the cable.Still, I wonder if we’re better off now than in the days when we got three or four channels and watched TV on a small-screen washing machine.

Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His email address is Swind15443@aol.com.

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